The message from Terry Skiverton is loud and clear ahead of tonight’s Bristol Street Motors Trophy game – we have to maintain our standards.
Crystal Palace Under-21s are the visitors for our second group match as we bid to take step closer to a potential final appearance at Wembley Stadium, with the Dons looking to build on a dominant FA Cup win on Saturday.
Although we will face a different type of test this evening it has been made abundantly clear to our squad that we must keep our momentum going at all times, regardless of the competition.
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Here Terry discusses what we will come up against tonight, our FA Cup draw and the return of Huseyin Biler.
BEFORE YOU CAME HERE WE PLAYED CRYSTAL PALACE UNDER-21S AND THEY SHOWED HOW COMPETITIVE THEY COULD BE ON THAT NIGHT. WHAT KIND OF CHALLENGE ARE YOU EXPECTING TONIGHT?
It’s going to be a tough challenge. Myself and Rob Tuvey went to watch them the other night when they played against West Brom and they had a fantastic performance and result in that game.
The way they play is aimed at trying to recreate what they do in their first-team. There’s a lot of pace and energy on transition, they’re well organised and they’ve got some real talented young players. For us it’s going to be a different challenge to what we face in League Two.
We’ll be respecting them and respecting the competition by picking as strong and as competitive a team as we can do.
THE COMPETITION RULES ONLY ALLOW FOR A LIMITED NUMBER OF CHANGES. WILL YOU BE LEANING ON THE MEDICAL/SPORTS SCIENCE DEPARTMENTS FOR INFORMATION ON WHO NEEDS TO SIT THIS GAME OUT?
We always lean on the medical and sports science departments for guidance. There’s sometimes knocks from previous games and then loading and minutes comes into it. We’ve got a tough month this month, so we have to juggle all of those factors.
As a management staff we have to come up with the best format for how we approach these Trophy games, we had Ayoub (Assal) and Josh (Davison) as substitutes and they would come on and impact the game. They would only play 45 minutes at the most and they looked fresher for it at that time.
We did well in the competition last season and I thought the way that we played in a lot of the games was really good. It’s good to build up competitive minutes and there’s a chance to get to Wembley at the end of it as well.
HOW DO WE GO ABOUT MAINTAING A WINNING MENTALITY?
What we don’t want to do is gain a bit of momentum and then go backwards with a poor performance. The lads were bright and bubbly in training yesterday off the back of a convincing win and performance. We have to go and back it up. We have to make sure that the players who come in make it look the same.
Every time we put a team out there it looks how a Wimbledon team should look. There’s been a couple of times where we’ve been disappointed with sections of games but on the whole our output is something that we can use as our standard bearer.
WE’VE GOT ANOTHER HOME DRAW IN THE FA CUP AGAINST RAMSGATE. ARE YOU HAPPY WITH THAT?
I’m very good friends with the Woking manager Darren Sarll, who they beat in the last round. We played Woking in pre-season and saw how competitive they were. I watched the Cray Valley Paper Mills game against Charlton Athletic last night and a lot of people are rubbing their hands and thinking that it’s a tie that they should win.
We’ve got to respect it. I’ll speak to Darren about them and then we’ll get our own eyes on them as well. We have to respect the history of giant-killers, I was at Yeovil Town who were known as the biggest giant killers in non-league football because of the amount of league scalps that they took.
It won’t half give them an extra burst of energy when they’re coming to somewhere like Plough Lane to play football in front of a big crowd. If we turn up and do what we normally do we’ll have too much for them. We have to put that into practice on the day.
HUSEYIN BILER STARTED HIS FIRST GAME OF THE CAMPAIGN ON SATURDAY. WHAT CHALLENGE HAVE YOU SET HIM AFTER HIS BREAKTHROUGH SEASON IN 2022/23?
We just want him to stay fit. He’s such a competitive young man, he wants to try and win every game, every challenge and even when he puts in a cross he wants it to be on the money. He holds such high standards of himself.
He kept getting reoccurring niggles and injuries so we’ve focused a lot on his prehab, which is the work he does before he goes out to train. We also make sure his recovery is on point because he expends so much energy.
We know that when he’s fit and when he’s there we’ve got two fantastic full-backs with Isaac Ogundere and Hus. They’re both young and over the course of the season we want to make sure Hus gets towards playing 20 to 30 games in order to have a real breakthrough.
With him, Ogs and Jack Currie the future is really bright in the full-back area for this football club. Just because they’re young doesn’t mean they’re not good enough.
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